Rek'Sai's Tunnel Tracker

In response to a players suggesting Rek'Sai's tunnels have an indicator so you know which one will be destroyed when you create another tunnel at max capacity, Beat Punchbeefnoted:

"Wanted to get this in for release but it didn't make it. Will definitely look to get this set up within the next patch or two."

[BUG] Team Builder Deselecting Skins

Here's Riot Boourns with a few comments on a Team Builder bug that is deselecting skins and how to work around it until it can be fixed:

"Hey folks, we were just talking about this bug this week. We know it's painful. Who doesn't want the skin-timidation factor on their side?

For more info: it's related to team builder now remembering your last selected champion, runes, and masteries. Unfortunately it's not getting your last selected skin correctly because teambuilder is made a bit differently than regular champion select. We're looking at how to fix it. In the mean time the workaround is to select another skin and then re-select the skin you want (you must deselect and reselect, just seeing it selected will not work in most cases).

As it's right before the holidays we're not going to push out any potential fixes till after the new year at the earliest so we don't risk breaking anything while you folks are playing over the break.

Sorry about the inconvenience. :( I feel your pain every time I play team builder. I can't land a blitz hook for beans if I don't have the iBlitz skin on (this may or may not be related to my mechanical skill...)."

Legend of the Poro King Q&A

Yesterday, several Rioters who worked on the Legends of the Poro King corralled together to answer your questions on our latest featured gamemode!

Our latest Featured Game Mode, the “Legend of the Poro King” is now live, and the Play team is here to field any questions or suggestions you guys might have! We make all of the Featured Game Modes, so feel free to ask us anything about Poro King (or any previous modes). Who are your favourite champs to engage with using the Poro Dash? What team comps have the best synergy with the Poro King? Where does the Poro King even go when he’s dispelled!?

We’ll be online from now for 2 hours from 11:00AM ~ 1:00PM PST. For the King!
-L4T3NCY
-BuffMePlz
-DefaultChar
-Ponts"

Legend of the Poro King Gameplay

BuffMePlz started off by answering a question on the inspiration for the game mode and a few early prototypes:

"While the result ended up being that everybody had a 2500 range Lee Sin Q, it wasn't actually the initial inspiration for the mode. We knew we wanted a the Poro King early on, and we went through several iterations on ways to summon him.

One early (failed) prototype had the Poros follow you in a long conga line, with the killer inheriting all Poros from the victim - at a conga line of X length, the Poro King would be summoned. This led to some very strange gameplay, with players at (X-1) Poros playing super passively, and ultimately didn't feel that different from regular ARAM until someone hit that (X-1) number, when gameplay devolved into the weird holding pattern we saw.

We later had a prototype where the point mechanic happened for getting a kill on a champion while they were "tagged" by a Poro. This proved to be fairly awkward, creating a sort of unclear scenario in which you would want to use the Poro spell - do I cast it for the damage, or should I save it in order to score a point? Additionally, the free long-range summoner spell only further cemented the early dominance that high-poke champions already exhibit on ARAM.

The solution? Change the mechanic into a gap closer, and make a poro hit == a summoning point. Suddenly those low-mobility poke champions are quite a bit less frightening, and throwing Poros was a fun thing you felt like you should be doing frequently. The tagging paradigm to recast was one that players were familiar with (from Lee Sin Q), but changed the gameplay in a way we found quite fun and different. Even though the end result was that everybody is trying their hardest to be Lee Sin (and resolving those difficult mind/body conflicts), it wasn't the initial inspiration - but we can say that we're pretty happy with how it turned out. =)"

L4T3NCY also commented on the poro skins tied to the new icons and if they maybe be extended to normal Howling Abyss, where the concept of Poro King came from, and more!

We've been overwhelmed by the response from everyone on the Poro skins. Glad you guys are enjoying them! They were originally conceived as just a little easter egg to the regular 250RP icons, so we didn't even dream that people might want them on the regular Howling Abyss too. We don't currently have any plans to transfer them over to regular HA after Poro King, but it's something we're going to discuss given the cool feedback from you guys.

The Poro King is a concept we'd been sitting on for quite a while, and felt this was the perfect opportunity to reveal him. The key was how to best express his nature through gameplay. Being a benevolent King, we wanted him to be a defensive, utility boon, rather than doing "tons of damage". We're pretty happy with his current incarnation.

We've seen a lot of players requesting the Poro Toss / Poro Dash spell in regular Howling Abyss. Rather than a Summoner Spell, it could be fun as maybe a new item though. This would preserve the longer cooldown impact design of Summoner Spells (assuming it could be worked into a champion agnostic item). It's not something we have planned though at the moment.

As we've shown in all previous Featured Game Modes, "player perception" of what is strong and the reality is often not 1:1. Just pick whatever you have fun with and go rock it! :D

When asked if there was any plans to do specific balance changes for the new game mode, BuffMePlz noted:

"We're not planning on doing any champion-specific mode balancing for Legend of the Poro King, though we are monitoring play/win/ban rates to make sure we don't have any super egregious outliers. I can't speak much for Howling Abyss in general, but I would say that champion-specific balancing is probably not the right way to address a class of issues - in this case, sustain being the overbearing mechanic would likely be more indicative that the mechanic needs to be adjusted on ARAM rather than individually adjusting champions for the mode.

We don't have a representative from the merch team here, so I don't know about the Poro King plushie. I want one too. =("

"It was a way to make the spell feel more impactful. One of the indicators of execution success in League of Legends is damage, and while the damage on Poro Toss is a bit superfluous, landing that long range skill shot is much more satisfying with a bit of extra damage at the end. The numbers are tuned very low intentionally - the idea isn't to give players an extra long range poke. At the same time, having no damage made the spell feel fairly underwhelming for long range mages who weren't apt to use the followup on a regular basis - having the entirety of the reward for landing the shot be delayed until your team's Poro King is summoned (while quite powerful) doesn't have the same moment-to-moment impact of seeing your enemy's HP go down when you make that amazing shot.

Also, using that Poro to get that low HP long range snipe is a pretty awesome moment in-game. =)"

One of my favorite things about the gamemode is the thrill of sniping an enemy with a snowball, or finishing one off with a close range blast. Why do they do true damage, and did you ever consider giving players a bonus for killing an enemy with them?

So, just to answer this in two parts:

As a poro cuddle is the closest thing we have to an expression of True Love, doing anything but true damage would be at best questionable.

…From a slightly more mechanical perspective: the poro throw spell’s “original” incarnation (or the closest thing to it) was actually a mode where you had two damaging summoner spells: The Poro Throw, which was basically the spell you have now, and “poro lob”, which we ended up using for Poro King’s friendship barrage. In that one, the throw was doing physical damage, and the lob magic (and we were throwing around ideas for making them scale on AP vs AD, etc.). What we quickly realized however was that one of the spells always felt “weaker”, especially against tanks: I would buy a last whisper, so my throw would be awesome, and my lob would be somewhat meh, or the reverse with Void Staff.

So, to make it feel like it was doing good damage regardless of the target/ your build, we decided to make the throw do true damage once we moved to just having the throw. The full extension of that would have been making it do percentage of max health true damage, but that might have been a bit much :)

As for the second question:

In general, our goal with the poro throw was to make the players feel “I want to throw it as much as possible”, because throwing poros is, in general, fun. Adding an incentive on death somewhat changes the decision making ,and we felt it would have one of two outcomes:

Case 1: If the incentive was very strong (Think Darius Ultimate), players would want to use their poro throw less, and “store it”. Not a bad thing necessarily, but not what we were aiming for.

Case 2: If the incentive is weaker (Say, “Get +1 gold”), it wouldn't actually really change your behavior, so would just be additional information that could be a “trap”, as you try to optimize around it even if you shouldn't.

So, basically: We want you to throw poros as much as possible, and were concerned that adding an on-death incentive could move your incentives away from doing so."

In response to a suggestion on the indicators used for poro toss, L4T3NCY noted:

"Quote

Minor QoL change: could the indicator for when you hit someone with a poro be a different color for your target than everyone else? Makes it easier to see which particular target you're about to dash to.

We discussed this and it feels like it would be a good QoL change. If we ever bring Poro King back, this would be on our list of good improvements to make."

"Well, he is the Poro King after all, not the Poro Tyrant! His greatest strength comes from inspiring his subjects to do amazing things, not just steamrolling his enemies. :)

I also think this mode had a lot of creativity built into it. From the art side with tons of awesome poro skins, from the design side with something simple but extremely fun in the "poro-toss" and "to the king" spells, and most importantly from players using those spells. Man oh man, you guys have come up with some really creative and hilarious combo's for these spells. It's totally awesome. :)"

In response to a comment that the mode is "essentially a more aggressive form of ARAM", L4T3NCY replied:

"I would disagree with your assessment of Poro King being that comparable to ARAM. Traditionally strong ARAM champs with poke & sustain are certainly still viable, but the mode's mechanics enable a whole wave of other champions. o.O

With each Featured Game Mode, we often talk about "player perceived strength", signaled very strongly by ban rate preferences from you guys. I see "Katarina" there in your "god tier" list too, so you might be interested in this post I wrote after Hexakill: TT. :)

When asked if Skarner's ability to ult someone and use his mode specific summoner spell to jump back to the poro king was intentional, Ponts noted:

"This was left in intentionally. It's a pretty awesome play for Skarner players to be able to make when their team has the Poro King summoned and we didn't want to remove that. I think it also adds a lot of urgency for the enemy team to dispel the King (or dodge those Skarner poro throws) that is pretty exciting."

Poros

When asked about the recent "poromania" and perhaps over saturating the community with all these adorable poros, Riot Otownnoted:

"Great question. We definitely want to remain aware of this. Poros are cute but League is about a balance of many elements and we aim to keep the core of it within that continual balance constructed by many more elements than just 'cute.' At the same time we try to listen to all of our players and many of them (you ) resonate with the poro. Overall, yes the concept can't be overplayed, but among the hundreds of skins/ champs and multiple maps already in existence, there ought to remain tons of other flavors of customizable content for now and years to come."

When asked if there were more versions of the poro skins, L4T3NCYrevealed:

"We did, and I wish we could have done all of them. >_< They were only meant to be an easter egg for the regular 250RP icons though so, we stuck with 5. Some that didn't make it include:

Bilgewater: He had a little pegleg and stubble. Yeah.Arcade: Done in a voxel style.Patchwerk: Sewn together from broken hearts.Bittersweet: He was a little pudding. He was going to jiggle. [jiggle jiggle]"

When asked about the inspiration for the mighty poro king, Riot Otownexplained:

"I can answer #2) The idea of the King Poro originated during a brainstorm on easter eggs that could be placed into the Howling Abyss when it launched. We loved the idea of a HUGE poro and eventually we took that idea and made something fun and usable. His design really pushed forward once he was named. A kingly Poro obviously needed to be endowed with facial hair, a cape and crown & regal slippers - the finishing touch. His horns are relevant to the horns of all things from the Freljord, but are much larger and more mature than those of the smaller Poros."

"It's a softer foot similar to a baby hippo, there's a toe nail, but the foot is flexible :D"

When asked why poros stick their tongues out all the time, Riot Otownnoted:

"Quote:

Poros stick their tongue out almost all the time, just like dogs when they're hot. Do they do that randomly because it's cute or are they hot (which is nearly impossible in Freljord) :D

"Poros consist of all the residual love and warmth left in the world after the many contentions in the Freljord. He is consistently warm - possibly even hot; even while enduring the chilling windstorms in the Howling Abyss."

When asked how many poro snacks it would take to turn a poro into the poro king and if anyone knows where the poro king lives, Riot Defaultcharnoted:

"Our researchers best attempts to generate a poro of the desired size ended with no visible change to the poro... or his hundred new compatriots.

As for where he lives, I've always felt that the true mark of a King is that his domain is all he can survey, and what is a King's Domain but his home?
(To rephrase: No.)"

As for how poros can actually deal damage when using poro toss despite their fuzzy demeanor, Riot Defaultcharcommented:

Featured Game Modes

When asked if they had put anymore consideration into a rotation featured game mode list, L4T3NCYnoted:

"Nothing that we can get into just yet. ^_^"

When asked if they do intended to bring Legend of the Poro King back in the future, L4T3NCY noted:

"As we've mentioned previously, we'd like to bring popular modes back, incorporating improvements and feedback from you guys (thus the One For All: Mirror Mode & Hexakill: Twisted Treeline). I hope we can find a way to bring him back one day!

Yes, of course we keep everything! :D RE whether or not we can just "flip on" a mode pretty quickly, the short answer is "no, we can't". :/ Each time we bring a mode back, time has to be spent QA'ing it against the latest patch release (one of the costs of having a game that evolves constantly).

For example: The original One For All required about 80 champions to be hand edited to work with the mode's mechanics. When we wanted to bring it back with One For All: Mirror Mode, about 35 champions had changed since last time (yay champ updates and improvements!) which required another whole round of editing, plus entirely new champions had been released."

As for a game mode the focused on a free for all, teamless type of combat, Ponts noted:

"Ok. Our first iterations of the Shurima mode turned out to be mostly an arena mode with teams. We found that those games were pretty fun for about 10min and then they felt like they dragged on without clear map objectives.

I'm not sure we'd do anything that got rid of teams all together. League in general is a lot more fun when you can play with your friends and make really awesome coordinated plays against the other team. It's an interesting idea though."

Other

When asked about Vel'Koz being disabled for the gamemode, Riot Defaultchar explained:

"Nope, not a balance thing. There was an issue that we were unfortunately not able to track down in time where sometimes his ability particles would fail to load for the opposing team, and would display as blue boxes. We thought we had a fix, but once it got on live turns out it hadn't addressed the issue for everyone, so we had to turn him off."

As for the team's personal favorite champions to play in the new mode:

Thanks! There is a larger conversation to be had about Featured Game Modes, engagement, rotating modes, etc that I'm hoping to kickstart soon™ with a devblog post. The TL;DR is, we love making them and hope you guys continue to enjoy playing them. :)"

"Jayce and Ezreal are my two "go-to", although I would probably say they're much less OP and more "I enjoy playing Jayce and Ezreal".

Definitely give Jarvan a shot: Both times I played him he felt pretty fantastic (I've also noticed my Flag n' Drag accuracy gets way better when I'm casting from melee). Might also be worth trying Sion if you're going for the "big guy punching you in the face" strategy? Having a shield delivery system is rather lovely."